‘Fully Into Ashes' paints images about the human experience.

Updated 10:39 am, Sunday, April 24, 2011

Sofia Starnes' subtle lyrics are hushed ceremonies of spiritual awakening — opening as slowly as wisdom. “The soul sweet-talks/its way into the throng/of lung, ribcage, hip. The lips/are doorsill, in and out;/I do not know which-way./What kills a rose?” But this climactic instant of beauty is not a death since the rose bush lives on in thorny branches and the classic image resonates in memory. “Distances” ends with a “wasted whiff” that “strikes/heart, a little beyond.” Beyond the commonsense reality we all whiff.

As in her third collection, “Corpus Homini: A Poem for Single Flesh” (2008 Whitebird Award, Wings Press), “Fully Into Ashes” maps an open landscape “where both the spiritual and the physical are intimately wed.” These poems evoke the holy spirits in nature toward “the divine elevation of all that is real.” Never sanctimonious, their religious roots and humble saints inhabit a poetic garden flowering with a second innocence.

Listen to the voice of “The House That Spoke”: “Here is a task to undertake—/let's build a house out of a sigh,/to be, through memory, a language: brick-work,/brick-word, rumors from swung rattan,//spelling out our tales./And the sigh will be the rust stain on the wall,/a pipe's great story which we failed to hear/in summer patches.” Romantic perhaps but not sentimental. Her original images create a fresh awareness of human experience — in part, as Starnes says, “because I consider belief to be experience.”

The book's three parts, intricately integrated, “fell into three clear stages,” Starnes says, and “ah, once more that intriguing and illuminating trinity.” These are apt words to characterize her poetry: intriguing and illuminating (and insightful, to make a trinity). Her artist's statement about the three parts reads: “There is ‘Find'; that is, the initial awareness of whatever life proffers. Then, there is ‘Ache,' our growing experience of loss and longing, both of which define us. And ultimately, there is ‘Gift,' when what becomes clear to us is that we are most often on the receiving end, having paid no price to equal its worth, of all that is Good.” Through continuous stages of discovery and suffering and bounty, we feel the sweet sense of wise mercy.

Aside from one six-page narrative, the texts roam between 20 and 50 lines, never wandering aimlessly. Their graceful rhythms, even when quirky, remind of Dickinson; their music echoes classical Spanish guitar solos; their shapes reflect paintings that inspire her (Goya, Donatello, Boucher). Yet comparative speculations are relatively meaningless in light of her meaningful words. Two elegies for her parents recall their earthly things. “The Scarf” ends when her “father tucks/a white luminous robe around himself—/not crowned, not wept—/a small verb: merely dozing.” “The Armoire” — “dense as a thicket” — reveals “its overlap of living/things on things thought lifeless.” Yet her mother's possessions persist luminously because “she leaves them for us.”

An earlier poem of a girl now grown with “a liturgy of ghosts” ends: “Loss is an old but ample word for ghost;/prize is the better word for angel” (“Lola's Window”). Such lines thematically connect the book's vision. “Look!” exclaim the last lines of “The Monument Restorer”: “Full are the man and the field, /full are we under the sun.”

Starnes' poetry has been published widely, won awards, and has been acclaimed by Billy Collins, Andrew Hudgins and others. “Fully Into Ashes” stands as a true book of poetry, not a mere collection of poems. It deserves wide attention from serious readers and lovers of contemporary poetry.